crime
igor.toronyilalic
It's over an hour before we see a woman in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. And even then, she arrives slowly, appearing at first more of a heavenly human smudge than a fully formed figure. But moments later she is filling the screen, and setting it ablaze with warm light. Light that seems to emanate as much from her blue eyes and young face as it does from her lamp. For the first time in the film, we can see. The male-dominated darkness that grips the opening 60 minutes lifts in response to this moment of clarity and beauty. The tired male eyes that greet her, all double- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although tinged throughout with blue, the Norwegian drama King of Devil’s Island is so grim it might as well be grey. Basing it on real events pitches the film as a cautionary tale, but the message is hard to determine. Everything shies away from explanation. Norwegians might have the context, but the rest of us need to fill in the gaps.Although filmed in Estonia, King of Devil’s Island (Kongen av Bastøy) is set on the island of Bastøy, at the seaward end of the Oslo fjord. Currently, the mile-square island is in use as a prison held as a model of humane rehabilitation. In 1915 it was a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Those quaint old TV shows in which we were invited to support and admire the police unreservedly have long been overtaken by real-life events. Now evolution has brought us to Line of Duty, a series that presents the police as a failing bureaucracy hamstrung by paperwork and political correctness. From what one gathers of how our contemporary rozzers operate - inviting you to report crimes by email, for instance, because police stations are only open some of the time, or arresting victims instead of perpetrators - this may be unpleasantly close to reality.Perhaps writer Jed Mercurio picked up Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There was a strange sense of ghosts, or rather absent presences, in the screening room where I saw Ben Drew’s iLL Manors (that orthography reflects the chosen spelling of the film’s title, and Drew is also as well known as Plan B, from his rapper music career).The late Alan Clarke turned up first, with a vhs of his Scum. Peter Mullan was down from Glasgow with NEDS, not the only Glaswegian visitor, along with Ken Loach, of the early vintage films. Gary Oldman was in from the East End, and of course Ray Winstone was already there in the company. Shane Meadows, certainly. Tim Roth, too. Some Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The bad taste left by The Black Panther lingers like a mouthful of cinders long after it’s been expelled from the DVD player. This latest entry in the BFI's Flipside series of rescued British film obscurities is the shocking adaptation of the story of British murderer and psychopath Donald Neilson, dubbed The Black Panther by the Seventies’ press. The film arrived in cinemas in 1978 within months of Neilson's conviction and was swiftly banned by local authorities concerned it was a gratuitous cash-in.It opens with Neilson preparing for crime. Ex-army, with a head full of the sound of marching Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It ended where it began, between Copenhagen and Malmö along the Öresund bridge. The journey back to square one took in issues of homelessness, mental health, immigration and child labour. Drug abuse, national identity, family break-up and the power of the media cropped up too. But none of these are what The Bridge hinged on. Without its main characters and measured pace, The Bridge could have been little more than a bleak trudge through society’s ills.The final episode was typically understated, revealing its layers and horrors gradually. Martin Rohde’s (Kim Bodnia) son had been abducted Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The first series of the French cops gone-to-pot drama ended with Lieutenant Eddy Caplan about to blow the head off his nemesis Serge Lemoine. Offing him was supposed to solve all Caplan and his team’s problems. Unfortunately, Lemoine was fitted with a wire and things didn’t go to plan. Series two began in the immediate aftermath with Caplan, his in do-do colleagues and Lemoine caged in the back of police van. As it rattled along, their on-the-run compadre Théo Vachewski was being hunted down.After a brief recap of the previous series, the episode was off and running. Braquo's Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Explaining the difference between the first series of the uncompromising French policier Braquo and the second, which he has come on board to write, Abdel Raouf Dafri says his take is “even more violent, even more sarcastic. The line between the good guys and the bad guys is even more fluid”. Dafri knows about bad guys. He wrote Mesrine and A Prophet. He also knows series one of Braquo is a tough act to follow.With series two premiering on British TV this Sunday, Braquo joins Saturday night’s The Bridge to fill out the weekend’s foreign-language crime TV schedule. The pacing, shocks and tonal Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It becomes increasingly difficult for a detective to create any sort of elbow room on the small flat screen in the corner. Up in Denmark they’ve been taking the extreme route, where the dour, bejumpered Sara Lund of The Killing looks like a Butlins entertainer next to Sofia Helin’s hatchet-faced autistic sleuth Saga Noren in The Bridge. In Blighty we churn out far more of these things than the Danes, but not much seems to have moved on much since Inspector Morse started feeling queasy around corpses and necking real ale two decades back. We still get our crimebusters from a strictly limited Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Does he know she's a bit odd?" asks one of Saga Noren's Swedish police colleagues, on hearing that Danish copper Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia) is working with Noren on a new murder case. Well, he's begininning to get the idea. He's seen her forbid an ambulance to cross her crime scene perimeter, even though it was carrying a new heart for a critically ill patient. She drags Rohde out of bed in the middle of the night to track down a piece of evidence, then when he delivers it to her at police HQ she barely says thanks and shuts the door in his face. Apparently she never eats meals.With her long Read more ...